I just found out that C++ lets one overload the unary & operator (address of). That seems so broken! operator& even can be made private.

Fascinating article about how wikipedia is evolving: http://tinyurl.com/yghu7ar

Mystery: how can a Linux defunct process (ppid 1) not be reaped by init *and* take up 100% CPU? What can be done aside from rebooting?

I’ve come to consider exceptions as one of the most important features of a language, so their absence in Google Go is a big turn off.

Tonight’s Rails lesson: try to have Rails require files automagically, so that they will be included in the Rails dev auto-reload scheme.

Trivia: which is the stronger assertion about a function: “thread-safe” or “reentrant”? When is it OK to call one type but *NOT* the other?

Great article on dumping stack trace within a program on Linux: http://tinyurl.com/5laub9 (useful in SIGSEGV/… handlers, for instance).

This is a lightweight UNIX command-line wrapper over CPUID: http://tinyurl.com/yg9eo4g. Much more info than /proc/cpuinfo.

Learning about the x86 CPUID instruction (http://tinyurl.com/yvorq6).

shmat fails on Linux 2.6.16 on SHM_HUGETLB segments unless the segment size is a multiple of the huge page size… Nasty and undocumented!